You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Saturday November 19, 1904
From the Appeal to Reason: Kate Richards O'Hare on the Making of Ladies' Hats
Ladies' Hat with Dead Bird of Paradise
In today's edition of the
Appeal we find the story of a Lady who, quite rightly, objects to wearing hats adorned with dead birds.
Kate Richards O'Hare wonders, however, if this same Lady is aware of the how Death stalks the girls who toil away their young lives in unhealthy factories creating the flowers and cutting the velvet with which her birdless hat is made:
"My friends laugh at me, and I am glad you understand that I could not enjoy even the most beautiful of your handiwork if I knew that a bird's life had been needlessly taken, for you know He said: 'I count the sparrow's fall.' And the tender eyes glowed with such sincerity and truth that it made my heart ache and I thought, "Poor girl! Poor girl! If she only knew! No life sacrificed, no songster missing from his woodland bower, and it is the the essence of sacrificed life she looks at so complacently. Not bird life, but the lives of girls like herself and of little children."
From today's Appeal to Reason:
He Counteth the ....Sparrow's Fall
Kate Richards O'Hare.
"Yes, it is perfectly exquisite, Madame! Your deft fingers have made a reality of my hazy idea, and I am sure this will convince the girls that one can be modish and humane at the same time, and that it is not necessary to wear the bodies of dead birds to have a beautiful and becoming hat."
It was a sweet-faced girl whose elegant dress proclaimed her the daughter of wealth whom I overheard speaking to the smiling, deft little French milliner, who stood beside her holding a beautiful specimen of her art.
"I am so pleased that you like it," madame answered. "I remembered that your tender heart rebelled against the sacrifice of life for your adornment, so I took particular pains with this that you might have something for your new ox-blood broadcloth, and here it is; ivory, velvet and ruby roses and no songster's life sacrificed."
"Thank you, you are very kind and I appreciate your thoughtfulness. My friends laugh at me, and I am glad you understand that I could not enjoy even the most beautiful of your handiwork if I knew that a bird's life had been needlessly taken, for you know He said: 'I count the sparrow's fall.' And the tender eyes glowed with such sincerity and truth that it made my heart ache and I thought, "Poor girl! Poor girl! If she only knew! No life sacrificed, no songster missing from his woodland bower, and it is the the essence of sacrificed life she looks at so complacently. Not bird life, but the lives of girls like herself and of little children."
Then my thoughts went back to one brilliant, cold January morning when I took my place in the columns of the toilers' army that marched away to the great artificial flower factory in lower Broadway, New York. The cold and snap in the air made my blood flow briskly and as I hurried along in the rosy dawn I thought even the life of a working girl in New York was not all bad. Reluctantly I fell in behind the crowd of girls who rushed pell-mell up the stairs to the factory. Most of them looked thin and blue and the cold air that made my blood bound seem to chill their ill-nourished bodies to the very marrow and make even the horrible, odor-laden air of the workroom welcome to them, for it was warm.
Toiling slowly up the steps I came upon Roselie, the little Italian girl who sat next to me at the long work table. Roselie, whose fingers were the most deft in the shop and whose blue black curls and velvety eyes I had almost envied as I often wondered why nature should have bestowed so much more than an equal share of beauty on the little Italian. Overtaking her I noticed she clung to the banister with one hand and held a crumpled mitten to her lips with the other. As we entered the cloak room she noticed my look of sympathy and weakly smiling said in broken English: "Oh, so cold! It hurta, it hurta me here," and she laid her hand on her throat.
Seated at the long table the forelady brought a great box of the most exquisite red satin roses, and glancing sharply at Roselie said: "I hope you're not sick this morning; we must have these roses and you are the only one who can do them; have them ready by noon sure."
Soon a busy hum filled the room and in the hurry and excitement of my work I forgot Roselie until a shrill scream from the little Jewess across the table reached me and I turned in time to see Roselie fall forward among the flowers. As I lifted her up the hot blood spurted from her lips, staining my hands and spattering the flowers as it fell. There was a stir of excitement for a few moments and then the police ambulance clanged up to the door, and the surgeon raised Roselie from my arms and carried her away.
The blood-soaked roses were gathered up, the forelady grumbling because many were ruined, and soon the hum of industry went on as before. But I noticed that one of the great red roses had a splotch of red in its golden heart, a tiny drop of Roselie's heart's blood and the picture of the rose was burned in my brain, and as I looked at the beautiful hat I could have sworn I saw a little brown spot in the heart of the largest rose.
The next morning I entered the grim, gray portals of Bellevue Hospital and asked for Roselie. "Roselie Randazzo," the clerk read from the great register, "Roselie Randazzo, seventeen; lives East Fourth street; taken from Marks' Artificial Flower Factory; hemorrhage; died 12:30 p. m." When I said that it was hard that she should die, so young and so beautiful, the clerk answered: "Yes that's true, but this climate is hard on the Italians; and if the climate don't finish them the sweat shops or flower factories do," and then he turned to answer the questions of the woman who stood beside me and the life story of the little flower maker was finished. The woman who said no life had been sacrificed for her adorning never heard it, and the little brown spot in the heart of her rose could not whisper it to her even though it nestled among the golden tresses just above the tiny pink ear.
No life sacrificed! No Life Sacrificed! Again my thoughts went back to the morning when I stood in the office of a huge silk mill and asked for work, but was denied. Jobs are few and far between in a silk mill for women; little girls have nimbler fingers, and besides they are cheaper.
Philanthropists tell us patience and persistence will win, and it did. One day there was an opening in the factory where are made the silks to clothe the women who never toil and where the women who toil to make them are clad in rags.
There I saw women with stooped shoulders and dead faces, women whose whole life seemed concentrated in their fingers. As little children they had gone into the factory and all the long dreary years only their fingers had been trained or developed, until at twenty they were poor, mis-shapen, distorted creatures, with hands whose swiftness and accuracy were beyond comprehension and whose every other faculty was dead, starved by lack of use.
As I looked at the gleaming folds of velvet with the ivory whiteness of a woman's shoulder, and the downy softness of a baby's cheek, I saw not alone the long weaving room where life threads are woven into fabric but a picture of the cutting room rose before. A long room whose every beam, as well as walls and ceiling, is coated with pure white. I remembered that when first I saw it was in the early morning before the little ones had come to work, and as I looked at the soft white walls tinted with the pink glow of the rising sun I thought it looked like a fairy palace, but at night, as I looked again in the dull gray gloaming, it seemed only a horrible whitened sepulcher.
All day long I had checked the lengths of uncut velvet as it came from the sizing room where the nap had been stiffened with a thin solution of lime.
These lengths were placed on long tables and little girls scarcely out of the cradle, and who had never known a schoolroom, took tiny knives and slipping them into the first row or pile of nap ran down the long table cutting just one row as she went, then back again, up and down, all day long and when the whistle blew in the evening she had traveled from fourteen to twenty miles.
The lime dust freed by the cutting floated out and settled alike on the walls and workers until both were covered by it-burning, corroding dust. All day long the children ran up and down breathing the death dealing dust, heeding not that it burned and scarred their tender skin or that their little feet and legs were swollen and distorted with continual running. Ceaselessly, noiselessly, uncomplainingly they trod the treadmill, making no murmur, voiceless martyrs to the god of Greed. Snatched from the cradle, helpless victims of the treadmill, they knew nothing of life but the ceaseless round of deadening toil. Beneficent nature seemed to have taken from them the capacity to suffer and they lived out their few short years of life unknowing, uncomprehending, not even capable of feeling grateful that outraged nature would claim her own and send the messenger of Death to close the door of the velvet mill for them.
Then the picture faded and I saw again the gentle, womanly face of the girl who would not wear the body of a dead bird and yet all unknowingly was wearing fabric woven from children's lives, dyed with the heart's blood of women, formed with the heart strings of the human race. But she does not know! She does not know! Deep down in my heart is that faith in God's creatures that makes me believe that they do not know. The work of every woman who does know is to tell the story of lives sacrificed until none can say "I did not know." If you cannot speak the words that will reach the heart, help the woman who can. If you cannot write the words that burn, you can carry the printed page. If your hands are full and your heart is heavy with your own woes, you can still give your heart and soul, and that unvoiced prayer from a million woman's hearts will reach even the uttermost ends of the earth.
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[photographs added]
SOURCE
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Nov 19, 1904
http://www.newspapers.com/...
"Yours for the Revolution":
the Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922
-ed by John Graham
University of Nebraska Press, 1990
http://books.google.com/...
See also:
From Prairie to Prison:
The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O'Hare
-by Sally M. Miller
U of Missouri Press, 1993
(search with "mature agitator" & choose p.45)
http://books.google.com/...
IMAGES
Ladies' Hat with Dead Bird of Paradise
http://inkup.blogspot.com/...
Kate Richards O'Hare
http://www.thecommunitypaper.com/...
Italian Girls Working in Artificial Flower Factory
http://geordi.wagner.edu/...
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Dortn iz mayn rue plats - Aquabella
Nit zukh mikh vu di feygl zingen.
Gefinst mikh dortn nit, mayn shats.
A shklaf bin ikh vu keytn klingen,
Dortn iz mayn rue plats.
-Morris Rosenfeld
English translation:
Don't look for me where birds sing.
You will not find me there, my beloved.
I am a slave where chains ring,
There is my resting place.
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